


She's Not Coming To Save Us

by lauraschiller



Category: Impostors - Scott Westerfeld, Uglies Series - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Andrew Simpson Smith has learned a lot, Control The Narrative, David understands, Dictatorship, Free Will, Gen, Mind Rain, Post-Prettytime, Tally feels guilty, War, Where Is Tally Youngblood?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:27:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26902867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lauraschiller/pseuds/lauraschiller
Summary: Andrew Simpson Smith asks his old friends for help, but how will he cope with her answer? This story has been cross-posted to FF.net.
Relationships: David & Andrew Simpson Smith, David/Tally Youngblood, Tally Youngblood & Andrew Simpson Smith
Kudos: 3





	She's Not Coming To Save Us

“No,” said Tally Youngblood. “I’m not coming to save you.”

“Why not?”

“You should know why not.” She scowled. “So stop asking.”

“You know she means it,” David added wryly. “I’d listen if I were you.”

Andrew Simpson Smith had a long journey behind him. Their cottage in the woods had been almost impossible to find. He was over forty, which for his tribe amounted to old age. His bones ached and he could sleep for days. He had only traveled this far because he and his fellow rebels desperately needed her help, and she wouldn’t even consider it?

“I do not understand, Young Blood.” 

“No is an easy word, Andrew. What’s not to understand?”

He picked up the handscreen he had placed on the table, to show them the global newsfeeds about the bombing of House Palafox. The recording was frozen in the middle of the dictator of Shreve’s triumphant speech, his mouth twisted with contempt, his bleached hair almost metallic against the background of his city’s skyline. 

Andrew stabbed the picture with one fingertip. “This man,” he said, “spits in the face of everything you believe in. When we first met, you told me there are no gods, but he demands worship as if he were one. You told me war was only for savages, but this war makes the blood feuds of my tribe look like a children’s game. You told me to seek the truth, but he lies with every breath, and his spy dust forces his people to do the same. The Tally Youngblood I once knew would never have hesitated to stand against him.”

David nodded grimly as Andrew spoke, as if he agreed, but when he looked at Tally to see her reaction, she avoided her husband’s eyes.

She did look a far sight from the glamorous young girl Andrew had mistaken for a goddess when they first met. She still had the black eyes, strong build and sharply elegant bone structure designed by Dr. Cable, but twenty years of living in the wilderness had worn off the shine. Her skin was red and weather-beaten, the flash tattoo faded, her hair gray, her clothes hand-sewn and mended several times over. She and David looked so alike, it was hard to believe they hadn’t grown up in the same place.

The cabin suited her, Andrew thought, looking around at the flickering hearthfire between them, the wooden furniture, the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, the animal hides covering the bed. Primal, that’s what it was. He had grown up in houses like this and felt instinctively at home. So why couldn’t he understand its owner? 

“The Tally Youngblood you once knew,” she said bitterly, “Was a brain-missing egotist. If you’re looking for her, you won’t find her here.”

And with that, she got up from the table, pulled on her coat and boots, grabbed the pulse saw that was one of her few modern possessions, and walked out. Moments later, the furious buzz of the saw could be heard outside as she worked off her temper on the woodpile, chopping logs.

Andrew and David sat together in awkward silence, drinking home-brewed apple cider, neither knowing how to continue. David, empathetic as always, was the first to speak.

“It’s not you she’s mad at, you know.”

“I know,” said Andrew. “She is angry with herself, as always. What I do not know is why.”

“She feels responsible.” David tapped the handscreen, which had gone into power-save mode and was now dark. “For the bombing, the dictatorships … everything that’s gone wrong since she brought down the pretty regime.”

Andrew snorted. “She gave us freedom. It’s hardly her fault if people choose to misuse it.”

“That’s what I said, but you know Tally.” David shook his head, love and frustration written on his face. “She’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders.”

“When will she learn that there are those who would gladly help her carry it?”

“I don’t know.” David sighed into his cup. “I just don’t know.”

Andrew wondered if he was thinking of Zane, the other man Tally had loved, whose death was the heaviest share of the burdens she carried. Trying to help her lover, she had indirectly caused his death. Trying to stop what she thought was a nuclear weapon, she had nearly killed a group of innocent scientists. They had all been so impulsive in those days, with no idea of how a choice that felt right at the time would carry terrible consequences in its wake.

If he had known when they first met that, by helping her, he would change so much that he couldn’t relate to his own tribe anymore, would he still have done it? Yes, he would. The rebels were his tribe now. Tally had opened the world to him and he had no regrets. But if she had them, he understood all too well.

“What about you?” Andrew asked. “You could help us.”

David raised one scarred eyebrow. “You took your time asking that, didn’t you?”

“Forgive me, I only meant - ”

“I know.” David, who unlike him had grown up without a concept of male pride, waved his apologies away. “I’ll never be as famous as my wife, and I wouldn’t want to be. Besides, one of us has to stay here. If we don’t, there’ll be nothing left to come back to.”

He gestured out the window to the ploughed fields and fruit trees surrounding the cottage, and to the barn where they kept their chickens and goats. Harvest season was almost over, but not quite; if they hadn’t been talking to Andrew, they would still be outside working. Living off the land was precarious. If they stayed away for too long, their crops would be overgrown and their animals starve or run wild. 

Was this another reason Tally refused to leave? Didn’t she understand that, as important as it was to have a safe space, sometimes you had to leave it to protect it?

“She may not be responsible for the world, but she still has power,” he said. “She has a voice to which many would listen. It seems such a waste that she will not use it.”

“I know.”

“What should I tell my crew?”

“The truth, I guess.”

Andrew dreaded the long journey south, but even more the expectant faces that would meet him when he arrived alone. Boss, they’d say, what happened? Where is she? What did she say? And all he’d have for them, for these people who fought, bled and died in her name would be the bare bones of what she had said: She’s not coming to save us. The end. It was a good thing, he thought wryly, that he hadn’t taken his late father’s place as the village holy man after all. That would have made a terrible sermon.

Unless … 

“She is right,” he said, straightening up where he had been slumped in his chair, reaching for the handscreen to stuff it back into his satchel. “How could I forget?”

“What are you talking about?” asked David, confused.

“She is not a goddess.” Andrew jumped to his feet and slung the satchel over his shoulder. “I, however, am the son of a holy man. I was trained to interpret the word of the gods for the good of my people.”

“You mean … ” A faint smile crossed David’s face. “You’re going to spin this.”

Andrew never tired of the myriad creative expressions of what he still thought of as the language of the gods. “Yes.” He smiled back. “I will spin it like the lifting fans on one of her hoverboards, to carry us upward. I will tell them what she told me: we do not need her to save us. We can save ourselves.”

“Good man.” David stood up too, clapped him on the shoulder, and took hold of the strap of his satchel. “At least wait until morning, though. It’s cold out there. We’ll roll out a sleeping bag.”

“Thank you.”

David’s smile faded, and he glanced anxiously at something over Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew realized that a cold breeze was coming into the cabin, and moreover, the pulse saw outside had stopped buzzing. He turned around.

Tally was standing in the doorframe, her black eyes glittering with conflicted emotion. The faded flash tattoo on her cheek was pulsing fast.

“You can’t have it both ways, Tally,” David said quietly, seeming to guess her thoughts without her having to say a word. “If you won’t join him, you can’t be upset at being left behind.” He walked over to shut the door behind her, keeping out the cold.

“I know!” she snapped. “I’m not upset, I just … ” She raked both hands through her hair, disarranging her already messy ponytail, and snarled. “I wish I could help, you know that. But I can’t have any more deaths on my hands. I can’t!”

David tucked his arm around her. She hid her face in the crook of his neck.

Andrew could have argued that by helping to stop a dictator who dropped bombs, she would in fact be saving lives. Pressuring her, however, would be useless; moreover, it would go against everything she had taught him about free will.

“I accept your choice, Young Blood.” He placed a light hand on her back. She turned around in David’s arms to show him a trembling smile. “But it would have been something, to challenge the gods with you once more.”


End file.
